


Obsidian Edge

by Skairunner



Category: Worm - Wildbow
Genre: Altered Mental States, Canon Compliant, Complete, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-23
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2019-02-05 23:32:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12804780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skairunner/pseuds/Skairunner
Summary: A mute girl is protected by her little brother after Gold Morning. They seek the safety of civilization but face many dangers, including the girl herself.





	Obsidian Edge

Scrape.

Pause.

Scrape.

Zhiyin ran the edge of her knife against many tiny edges of the stone block. It took away from the edges of the stone block but made the knife edge neater and prettier. Less painful. There were too many edges in the world, conflicting, nasty, and barbed. The knife edge was simple. A single line. She inspected it. Maybe the fact that it was such a pure edge made the imperfections more obvious. She raised the knife again.

“You know making a knife that sharp is bad for it, right?” the boy said. The caretaker. She looked at him. The boy hesitated. “Because, uhmm, if it’s too sharp, it’ll break? … Dammit, nevermind.” He played with the ragged, poorly cut tips of his hair.

Zhiyin turned her gaze back to the many small edges and the single almost pure edge.

Scrape.

She felt the boy sit next to her, lean against the crumbling brick wall. The concrete floor was edges too, now that she looked at it, though they were jumbled. Not aligned. It didn’t hurt her too much. Same for the forest that started where the concrete ended. Nature usually wasn’t very sharp. The thousands of tree leaves made edges that tickled.

Scrape.

“I think we’re closer to the portal,” he said. “Last night there were lights in the distance. ‘Cross the valley. We’ll have proper food, again. I think.”

Scrape.

“I hope.” There was a sigh. “Well then. Zhiyin?”

She heard her name, and turned to look. The boy pulled something out of his backpack. It was food, a metal tin with the Chinese characters for RATIONS stamped on the side, with the little square, then the rice character, then the one that looked like an evil eye. It had already been opened. There were a lot of ugly edges on it, and she cringed. The boy jumped a little.

“Oh. Oh, I’m sorry. Fuck, I forgot—”

His words were edges, too, even if they were directed at himself and not towards Zhiyin. She made a weak noise of protest, edged away. It hurt. She _could_ let go and make it stop, but somehow she knew that she shouldn’t. So she held on.

“Oh fu— No. No.” He dropped the tin back into the bag, hiding away the pain. He took a deep breath.

“Okay.”

He rummaged around in his bag. The curled-up barbs that had surrounded him slowly faded away. He had a block on his palm, now, wrapped in edges, the pure kind. She would’ve liked to touch them, but they were pliable, impermanent, compared to the blade in her hands right now.

He unwrapped it and broke off a piece, held it up to her.

She opened her mouth obediently and chewed. It tasted faintly sweet, and was dry.

The boy had some, too.

“I think of this every time,” he said. “That I’m just glad you _do_ eat. You have to eat to be healthy you know, right? Do you? Well, you should.”

Zhiyin ran her knife against the stone again. The blade rasped.

“It’s lucky that we’re still. Here. Still here. You know.” The boy was looking into the bag. “Remember the mountain? If we’d left home just a little later, maybe we would’ve died too.” Zhiyin did remember. A gold speck in the sky. A line connecting to the earth. Spreading light. The memory was faint, though. Almost imagined, instead of lived-through. She stopped her motions, trying to figure out why.

Oh, that’s why. She couldn’t remember feeling any edges, then.

The boy prompted her, and she got another mouthful of dry rations to chew on.

“I think that was the last time you said anything,” he said, looking upwards, now. Leaning on his hands. Zhiyin followed his gaze, but there was only the blue sky above. There were never any edges in the sky. It felt wrong, like looking at something so black that it seemed like it didn’t exist, but it was also good to not have pain.

He didn’t continue, at least not immediately. When he did, his voice had a tremor in it. “I miss hearing you talk. I miss talking to _you_. I don’t know what’s happened to you… I hope a doctor can fix it. I hope the portal city has a doctor.” He rubbed at his eyes. “You’re the only one I know that’s left, Zhiyin. Mom and Dad, and our aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins, I think t-they’re”—he drew a shuddering breath—”They’re all dead. Everyone. Zhiyin, I don’t know what to do, honestly. I’m trying so hard, but you’re always the one who knew what to do. I was the stupid little si—little brother, always chasing after you and you had all the ideas and they were all so good… You knew what to do, Zhiyin, you really did...”

Zhiyin’s shoulder was heavy, and damp. The boy was leaning on her, on her left side. She pressed a finger down on the knife. It felt right. Nice and sharp and straight. Too bad it would turn ugly again, soon. It never lasted.

The boy kept leaning on her. She wondered if he would give her more of the crumbly food.

The wind blew through the edges on the trees, making rustling noises that felt the same way the edges did. Soft and… and rustle-y.

It was more like a feeling of uneasiness at first. Then she felt the dozens of needles moving through the forest. She breathed in sharply. They were good edges, so it didn’t hurt, but suddenly so many…

The boy straightened. “What’s the matter?”

Zhiyin raised her blade and pointed, lining up her good edge with the dozens of good edges in the forest. The boy squinted, then inhaled sharply. “Get up, we have to—”

“Stop. Don’t move.” The voice came from a splotch of grey. Zhiyin thought it had been shadows, but it was actually a woman. She cringed. The woman’s words felt like grabbing a cactus. She tried to focus on the pretty needles in the woman’s belt, and the blade in her hand. It was hard. The words were so much more present. Should she...?

The boy slowly raised his hands. “Who are you?” he said.

The woman was wearing a tattered grey and white cloak, and had a featureless mask covering her face in the same colors. It reminded Zhiyin of cows, the way everything was patterned. She was holding up a long stick, probably as long as Zhiyin was tall.

The boy wasn’t making barbs. It was probably okay.

“Huh. Didn’t expect you to speak English, girl. You CUI?”

The boy shook his head. “Never even been to China, ma’am. And I’m not a girl.”

The woman snorted. “Polite, at least. Didn’t take you for a boy. What are you doing out here?” She lowered her… her gun.

“Looking for the portal, ma’am. My sister, she’s kinda sick, and we’re running low on food.”

“Names?”

“Matt Zhang, and she’s Zhiyin.”

Zhiyin turned towards the boy on hearing her name, but the boy wasn’t paying attention to her.

The woman readjusted her grip on her weapon, then raised a hand to her head—though was it really a hand? It was colored strangely, and had edges when people usually didn’t. “Two runners, Asian boy about five feet four and Asian girl five feet five. Girl is armed. Boy speaks English. Claimed names are Matt Jang, girl Joo-een Jang.” She mangled the pronunciation of Zhiyin’s name. The woman stood like that for a while more, head inclined. The boy shifted his weight from one foot to another, hands minutely trembling in the air.

The older, sharp words were fading away, now. While she couldn’t _feel_ non-sharp ones, they helped cover up the barbs. Not that they ever fully went away, prickly on her skin.

“Copy that,” the woman said. “Alright, good news, you’re cleared to come in. Bad news, it’s two hours’ walk that way”—she pointed with her chin—”and we’re going to have to start right now. Take the lead.” The boy hesitated. The woman quickly added, “You can lower your hands now, but no sudden moves.”

The boy turned towards Zhiyin. “You heard her, right?” he said in Chinese. “We have to go. I… I _think_ she’s from the town I saw. I think. I hope you don’t mind if I pack up the sharpening block.” Zhiyin stared back at the boy, then looked down at the food he was still holding. He followed her gaze. “Oh, right…”

The boy picked up the lid of the box for the many-edge stone as Zhiyin chewed. He put the whole thing in the bag, then shouldered it. “This way.”

She followed the boy downhill, still trying to unstick the no-longer-dry food from her teeth. He looked back a couple times, and when he did, she did, too. The lady with the gun was trailing them. Though she wasn’t pointing the gun at them, her gaze was still intense.

They walked quietly like that for a long time.

“You’re from the town over there, right?” The words were English, so the boy was probably talking to the woman. They irritated her skin as they brushed past her, like a cucumber. Prickly spines hidden in smoothness.

“Yes,” the woman said. “Call me Sierras, if you want.”

“How… how is the town?”

The woman didn’t immediately reply. “Getting by,” she said eventually. “Not enough of us to keep order, though.”

“Order?”

“Used to be Protectorate. There’s bandits everywhere, and even worse, _cape_ bandits.”

“So you’re a hero?”

“Never stopped.”

“I’d thought people would help each other out, when everything’s so bad.”

“That’s what you’d _think_. No, boy, not having the parents around means the kids set fire to the house, and electrocute themselves to death in the process.”

“Why do you keep calling me boy, ma’am? I have a name. It’s Matt.”

“I call everyone boy. Hell, I called _Legend_ boy. Still do, actually.”

The boy made a huffing sort of noise. Zhiyin furrowed her brows, trying to figure out what it meant.

A laugh. That’s what it was. A good thing. Probably. No sharpness.

“Okay, that actually does make it better.”

“Well, I’m glad you think so.”

The conversation trailed off.

“Wait,” the woman said. “Tell her to wait.”

“Zhiyin?”

She turned.

“You heard Sierras.” The next words were directed towards the woman. “She knows English too, ma’am.”

The woman looked around, turning her whole body rather than just her head. “Something’s—”

A woman blurred out of the trees and crashed into the gun-woman, sending her straight into a pretty blade-edge that had appeared from nowhere. Little white pellets rained from the other side and hit the ground, sprouting even more large swords. The boy shouted.

Zhiyin was stumbling, overwhelmed by the new sensations.

“Fuck _you_ and your prissy, holy bullshit!” the new woman yelled, punctuating each word by slamming the gun-woman against the ground. They were struggling against each other.

“Get the _fuck_ on the ground or I’m gonna blow your brains out!” A man had appeared, and was pointing one palm each at Zhiyin and the boy. “Now!”

Their voices positively bristled with snarled, twisting thorns and cut through to Zhiyin’s core. She had to do it. It hurt too much. She grabbed the edges, all of the edges, even the ones inside her, and _pushed_. She cried out in pain as all of the edges within her stabbed out.

 

 

 

I turned into a mass of black spikes like a sea urchin, and impaled the torso of the man in a dozen places.

But more importantly, I felt like I had stepped sideways out of a waterfall, or like I’d realized I had been looking at a picture the wrong way up. Clarity. No more edges within me to clutter up my mind. Nothing to distract me now.

Matt was cringing, curled up on the ground. I’d startled him out of his wits, pretty much. He’d seen this happen before, but I supposed you never could get used to it. I wouldn’t ever hurt my little brother, but how could he know that? I couldn’t speak in this form, and I couldn’t think in the other, but I wish I could tell him that simple, undeniable truth. I knew that from his perspective, I always exploded unpredictably and lethally, and it was sheer luck that he hadn’t died yet.

I’d had the presence of mind to keep all of my spikes away from Matt when changing. Each spike was a geometrically impossible construct made entirely of edges. They would probably cut clean through anything. The way light scattered and diffracted through each spike… somehow, the physics worked out, and they looked like polished obsidian with a thousand thousand facets inside.

Clearly Sierras had a blade-resistant coat, because she hadn’t been sliced into two pieces from being slammed into the huge swords the man had made with his power. And when the pine needles and deciduous leaves on the forest floor had gained edges as sharp as knives, when I’d turned the man and the other woman’s own clothes into weapons against them, I’d remembered to dull the edges on Sierras’s clothes, because… because she didn’t deserve that.

The man was dead many times over already, and the woman who’d attacked us… I tried not to pay attention to her. She’d dodged my body’s spikes, but had instead been mangled by her own clothes.

I only had so much time I could stay in this state before I had to turn back. I wish I could’ve stayed forever. Then at least I could _think_. I knew I was always me, even if I wasn’t transformed, just… less of me. But I couldn’t help but feel like I was about to die, when all these spikes were shoved back into me and gummed up my head, when I couldn’t think straight anymore. I tried to enjoy what I had.

Matt stopped trembling, as he realized he was still alive. I didn’t have eyes, but I could tell he was looking at the spikes all around him, that he was being careful not to touch them. Not that I would’ve let him. I wondered if I could write a message, somehow communicate that I was still there—that I existed, that I’m not just a blank shell, that I can _think!_ —but I didn’t have that level of fine control over my spikes. I’d be more likely to cut him into pieces.

I ached. The body that I didn’t have started to hurt. I knew my time was quickly running out. It was too short, and too soon, but did I really have a choice?

I didn’t know if it worked that way, but I tried hard to hold onto one thought, something that would hopefully last when I fell back into the twilight of my own mind. I wanted to—I _needed_ to… to show Matt that I loved him. Tell him I appreciate what he’s done for me. I… I wanted to hold his hand. Give him a hug. Smile. Something. _Anything_.

The spikes were coming back, now, and my control over all the edges in the area was sliding out of my grasp, like a length of rope slips out of the hand of someone hanging from a precipice. I bid my farewell to lucidity.

And even as I started to turn back, I kept holding onto those thoughts, as I lost grip on the edges, as they instead protruded into _me_ , as my head filled with the buzzing, crawling, obnoxiously _present_ sensation of every edge I could see, from the leaves, to the bark, to the rocks, to the bag, to yes even the dirt and my knife and the big blades which fade away and the grass and the needles and the air and the the

 

 

 

“The fuck was that,” the woman muttered with a groan.

“No… no profanity, please, ma’am,” the boy said. “My sister doesn’t like it.”

Neither of them got up.

“You okay, boy?”

“Were those the bandits?”

“What do you think?”

The boy rolled to his feet, carefully, and stood. He made his way over to the woman, almost tripping at one point. “I haven’t been hurt by Zhiyin yet,” he said. “I don’t know why or how, but… I’m glad. I don’t know if she could live without someone to take care of her. Are you okay, though, ma’am?”

“Been through worse,” she muttered. “Think I got a concussion. Fu—frick me. Frick. Doesn’t feel like real swearing.”

The words tickled.

The boy walked to Zhiyin. “Are you still okay?”

Zhiyin looked into his eyes.

The boy nodded.

“So. Sister’s a cape?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” She groaned, and slowly sat up. “Base, Sierras.” She waited a beat. “Attacked by Phoenix and Bladecall. Both dead. Joo-een, the girl, is a Breaker, Shaker, Striker who turns into spikes, makes everything sharp. I have moderate injuries including a concussion. The boy is unharmed. Would appreciate an escort back.”

The boy kept looking at Zhiyin. She blankly looked back. His lips changed shape, then he looked down at her hands. “Oh,” he said. “You dropped your knife.” He glanced around, then crouched to pick it up. The edge was ruined, like he had said. When Zhiyin had dropped it. She took it, and felt her other hand twitch.

“Right. We just need to wait here for circa thirty minutes and _maybe_ a Mover will be free to help us back,” the woman said.

“I… I’m not sure if I want to be next to... those.” The boy gestured at the corpses, and the feathers scattered everywhere.

“Too bad, boy. Not about to brain myself trying to walk.” Sierras slumped against the tree trunk where there had been a blade moments before.

The boy sat next to Zhiyin.

Her hand found his.

He jerked. Turned to look at her.

Zhiyin’s other hand played with her knife. She held it blade-up, rubbing her thumb along its ruined, ugly, but still-better-than-the-tin-can edge.

The boy’s eyes grew shiny. He dipped his head. Squeezed her hand.

She squeezed back.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you much, BeaconHill, profHoyden for beta'ing. Bacon gets a ration cube. It's the densest, still-edible chunk of food you could ever imagine. It's the stuff that sticks to the roof of your mouth instantly.
> 
> Thanks to Forgery and Nonagon for the two nameless capes who instantly get gibbed by Zhiyin. Their sacrifice will be remembered.
> 
> This was an experimental piece. I tried to emphasize the shard-screwiness by having 3rd person limited PoV with no commentary (angrily, sadly, looked concerned...), and the switch to 1st person was to show that there was still a person in there in a very jarring way. 3rd person limited with no commentary is pretty much the furthest emotional distance you can get, and 1st person is the closest, so I thought the contrast might be interesting. I would greatly appreciate feedback on whether it worked.


End file.
